Although Arthur Lamothe’s film La neige a fondu sur la Manicouagan (1965) may have escaped our collective memory, its theme song, commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada, remains one of the most popular songs ever to have graced the Quebec music landscape. An ode to the bareness of the windswept, ice-covered wilderness of Quebec’s North and to the solidarity of the Québécois spirit, the political underpinnings of Mon Pays brought many to regard this song as a true “Quebec anthem” in spite of the songwriter’s protests that he had never been out to compose a national anthem.

In 1965, Mon Pays won the Félix Leclerc Award of Festival du disque in Montreal, and one of its early performers, Monique Leyrac, was presented with the Grand Prix of International Day at the International Song Festival in Sopot, Poland. Mon Pays was also a winner at a festival held in Ostend, Belgium. In 1987, Mon Pays was voted best Quebec song as part of a competition held by Radio-Mutuel network. The pianist and composer André Gagnon quoted the theme of Mon Pays in the first movement of the fourth concerto of his Mes Quatre Saisons series.

The song’s tremendous success at home and abroad inspired Vigneault to pen a sequel, Mon Pays II.